One of the primary benefits of digital photography is the ability to take photographs without worrying about a per-photo cost of film and development. As a result, people may take scores of photos under situations where they previously would have only taken a few. This proliferation of photographs has its downside, however, when it comes to organizing and accessing the images in an intelligent manner.
One way to organize digital photographs involves taking advantage of the fact that the electronic data associated with each photograph exists as an electronic file. Thus, file systems provided by computer operating systems may be used to impose order on a set of digital photographs. For example, a photographer may create separate electronic file folders for each photographed event, and store the image files of all photos taken at a particular event in the corresponding electronic file folder.
When a more sophisticated organizational structure is desired, digital image management applications may be used. Digital image management applications typically provide a variety of ways to organize and view digital images. For example, many digital image management applications allow users to organize photos into digital albums, where a single photo may concurrently belong to several albums.
Whatever the organizational mechanism, digital image management applications typically require the user to specify, on a per-photo basis, the photo-to-organizational-structure mapping. Given the potentially vast number of digital images that a photographer may need to manage, it is desirable to provide a less labor-intensive technique for managing digital photos.
Rather than make static photo-to-organizational-structure assignments, it is possible to manage the photos by applying dynamic filters to a photo collection. A filter is typically associated with a particular set of criteria, such as “size >2 megabytes”. After applying a filter, the user is presented with only those photos in the collection that satisfy the criteria associated with the filter. However, even the use of dynamic filters can be labor intensive. For example, a user may have to manually assign photos to categories in order to filter photos based on categories.
The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.